Sweet Potato Dog Treats

I’m a dog person, have been since I was five or six years old. Before that, not so much. When I was a tiny tot, a Saint Bernard greeted me a bit over-enthusiastically. I was too little to understand that knocking me to the ground and towering over me licking my face was the dog’s overly enthusiastic way of being friendly, so I was scared of dogs for a while. My parents did the best thing you can do in that situation: they bought a dog. A Toy Poodle, to be precise. It’s kind of hard to be scared of a little fluff ball of a Toy Poodle puppy. Oh, I was at first, but she won me over. Many years later, I met and fell in love with my husband’s grandfather’s Labrador, and we’ve had Labs ever since. My dog now, Willie, is named after him. The dog, that is, not the grandfather. That’d be weird.

Labradors are amazingly patient with and tolerant of kids. How many toddler fingers fit in a nose? What happens if you pull on a tail? What’s the highest pitch screech that won’t send a dog running from the room? Labs, being bred to retrieve gamefowl, are really good at learning to keep their mouths gentle. A well-trained Lab can take a treat from a toddler’s hand, with said toddler feeling nothing more than a bit of slobber. It’s no surprise that my kids love dogs, too!

Which brings me back to these dog treats. My middle child and her fiancé got a rescue dog several months ago. He’s a real sweetie, but he came to them with a very sensitive stomach. I wanted to make some treats to give him and my eldest child’s dog that wouldn’t upset Franklin’s stomach. I looked up the ingredient list for his puppy chow online and experimented a bit. Willie, needless to say, was more than willing to test the treats for me!

Ingredients:

1 large sweet potato

1 large carrot

½ cup (4 oz, or 110 g) frozen peas

¼ cup (120 ml) canola oil

¼ cup (1+5/8 oz, or 46 g) potato flour

1 large egg

½ teaspoon salt

Preparation:

1.) Preheat the oven to 250º F (121º C). Peel the sweet potato and carrot, and roughly chop them into large (1½”, or 3.81 cm) chunks. Place them in the bowl of a food processor.

2.) Pulse until everything is finely chopped and relatively uniform. Add the remaining ingredients. Process until well-combined but not smooth.

3.) Scoop by well-rounded teaspoonsful onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Gently press each pile flat with the back of a nonstick spatula.

4.) Score the cookies with the edge of the spatula, about half to three-quarters of the way through. This makes them easier to break in half later.

5.) Bake for one hour. Remove from the oven, rapidly flip the cookies, and return to the oven for another hour.

6.) Cool on wire racks before storing in an air-tight container. I keep mine in the freezer just because I have no idea how quickly (or even if) they might spoil.